0:04
I'm ant Hodges, this is less. Is the strategy. The podcast that proves doing less is the most powerful business decision you will ever make. Are you ready to find out what becomes possible when you simplify then let's dive in. We need to talk about something extremely important. The free line has moved so far away from your website that the tactics and strategies that everybody has been telling you who has written marketing books over the last 20 years, been an internet marketer in the last 20 years, kind of done the whole Product Launch Formula thing. And you know, they've grossed millions of dollars in their last launch. And they're telling you to do these things, we need to change our strategies, because the world has changed. What I'm talking about is email list building now, building an email list is going to be one of the best things that you can do in your business. I don't disagree with the fact that an email list could be your most underutilized asset in your business, but it could become the most valuable asset in your business. Why underutilized? Because so many people just email when they want to sell some stuff. They're not cultivating a relationship with their list. They are not adding value. They're not demonstrating that they're an expert. They're not bringing transformation before a sale. And this, it kind of pains me, because when you get onto someone's email list, to stay on that email list, there needs to be some level of value. I need to be able to understand who you are, what you do, how you can help me, and I need to be able to have content that I can take some kind of action on in a regular basis that's going to help me to truly understand and trust that you're a real expert, that you've got credibility. I want you to tell me stories in your emails. I want you to talk about your journey of success, but also share your journey of failure. What are the lessons that you've learned? Failure is a weapon that we can use in our marketing that is very rarely talked about. And when I say a weapon, you know it's it's something that cuts through the noise, because when you've got some kind of influencer who's just constantly walking down a beach. They're driving some great car, they're in the sunshine and all of this kind of stuff. And they say you can have this lifestyle too. Grant, granted, they may certainly have been able to get their business to the point of doing this. And it goes back to that Lambo posing internet marketer of yesterday that we used to see. He would sit on the Lambo and he would say, Oh, you can have all of this. The reality is that that kind of marketing is all about show. It's all about, you know, model my lifestyle and all of this kind of stuff. And there are still a lot of people doing all of that kind of stuff. When you stand in a marketplace and you say, Do you know what few years back, I learned a huge lesson. What was the lesson? What did you learn? How did you change it? How did you move forward? People will listen because they can identify with the lesson that you learned. They can identify with that failure point more because it's going to potentially be more real in their life than that desire some point in the future of wanting to have a lifestyle that some influencer is promoting. Now, don't get me wrong, we need to have goals. We need to have ambition. But I truly believe that in your emails, when you're sending emails to your list, to the customers that have bought from you, you need to be doing it on a regular basis. You need to be showing up to add value. You need to be showing up with stories. You need to be showing up with offers, and combining all three of those things is crucial. And what does value mean? Value is how they can really, truly transform how what's the payoff of doing the things that you say, that they can do, and if they can actually do something and get a result, then you're putting an investment into that Bank of goodwill that you can extract and take a withdrawal from at some point when you then position an offer. But don't let your email list just be bombarding people with offers after offers, after offers, after offers. You. The Email build email list. Building is important. I hope you understand that. I understand that. But the number one priority if you're building a personal brand, if you're building a business, is not to build your email list, because actually, in a marketplace today, in a marketing era, in a marketing environment, whatever we want to call it, where things like video, things like podcasts, things like social media, when all of these take precedent of getting the attention of your potential audience, you need to be learning how to show up more. So the number one priority, I truly believe, is visibility and audience building that's got to come before list building. And the people who will say, Okay, well, I've got a training that will get you your first 100 leads. I put something out on my social media a few weeks back, and I asked people if I could show them a training on how to get the first 100 leads into their business, or the next five customers in their business, which would they want? And it was really interesting. It was kind of a bit of an even split. It was about 5050 it was just it was 48 52% on the poll, and 52% wanted the leads. But I truly understand why people would want more leads, more people on their list, and getting a training to do that, because you think in old school internet marketing mindset, that's what it is. If we get people onto our email list, then I can nurture them, then I can talk to them, then I can sell them. I can bombard them with emails. I can give them offer after offer after offer, and then they'll eventually buy something at some point, granted, it's a strategy you could employ that today you could grow a huge email list and get consistent leads onto your email list and consistently sell to them, if you wanted to, but getting five higher paying clients in your business right now is then going to transform Your business, and you move away from having to be just constantly hustling, and you end up becoming the hunted rather than the hunter. And I think for me, our mindset has to be of creating a personal brand, creating visibility in the marketplace that really, truly demonstrates our expertise, what we do, how we do it, how we can transform people's lives, how we can transform people's businesses, whatever niche we're in. And then people buy into the content. First, they start following us. They start engaging with that content, and you can position what I call no brainer offers within that content that is paid for, offers on your website for them to come and purchase something with real money, not buy something with an email address that's a lead magnet is, you know, you take them through to a squeeze page or a landing page that captures their details, and then they're on your list. That's the old school way of Internet Marketing. And in 2026 whilst those internet marketing tactics will still work if you want to play those kind of games, and, you know, build huge email lists and spend huge amounts of money on email marketing platforms to send people emails. How about you, literally just create an absolute no brainer of an offer that, instead of a lead magnet, becomes a client magnet, something that actually attracts people to you who will pay you for something. And this is where the free line has moved. The free line started on our website, on that kind of lead page, the lead magnet page, where we'd put some text up, put a graphic of maybe a PDF or something like that, and then we'd get somebody on the email list, and then over time, we send them lots of emails, and maybe something would get purchased. Let's flip this what comes before the lead magnet page visibility. So let's move the lead magnet page over here for a moment, and what we need to start with is visibility. And we need to start with showing up, being visible, standing out in a marketplace. I deal and work with a lot of coaches, trainers, consultants, course creators, and one of the biggest challenges that they have is standing out in a crowded marketplace. Some of them will say to me, okay, well, my course is unique. It's a unique framework. There's nobody like me. I don't have any competition. You have competition. There are other coaches, trainers and consultants out there, putting content out there, running ads, marketing their things, launching their things, that will compete with other people, that will compete with you for the eyeballs of your potential customers, because whilst they may not necessarily be offering the same thing that you're offering, they're offering something else as another challenge or another another solution to another challenge or a problem in that person's life. And I, I have not yet met somebody in my community, a member of my community, or actually, let me correct that I've met one person in my community who is truly unique in the marketplace and standing there in the marketplace, and that person does actually have something that I've never heard anybody else talking about, and they are truly becoming recognized and known as the expert. But most other coaches and consultants and trainers and course creators, there's always somebody else that offers something very similar. So being able to raise your head above the power pit and stand out in a crowd is important. It comes down to being consistent with your content creation, consistent with your message, and staying on point, staying in your lane, and literally seeing it as a priority to be as visible as possible so that you can lead them to something else. And my big thing is you can lead them through to a lead magnet, if you want to. But I will often say to people, have you tried just sending somebody to a low cost offer? You know, just a no brainer, instant purchase. No thought needed. You know, they're just going to buy, impulse purchase, buy kind of thing, and most people haven't, because they're still in this mindset of the internet marketers from 2000 who've literally said we need to build our email list. List Building is the number one priority. Get people on your list, but get people on your list of buyers, build your audience. It's what there's a lady called Laurel porty. She does Facebook ads training, and she's she's an expert at Facebook ads. One of the things she talks about is building an invisible list. And this is utilizing video content. And if you can create video content that actually serves people, put it into an ad campaign, and you put that ad campaign out there, but you base it on an engagement level. From getting video views, you're starting to build an invisible list. You're building your audience. You're getting eyeballs onto your content, and the more they watch of you, the more they're going to see that you're an expert. The organic reach on social media platforms and platforms like YouTube and podcasting platforms is dire, but it's getting better, because the algorithms have shifted. Instead of really serving people that you're following, serving you people that you're following, what they're actually doing is serving people who share content that they think may be of interest to you. They're looking at your interests and your behaviors, what you're looking at what you're engaging with and trying to serve you more of that content, so the more consistent you are with your message on any of the social media platforms, and including YouTube, I don't include YouTube as a social media platform. Many people do, but YouTube is a video search engine. It's the second most used search engine in the world, but it's still a platform we can publish alcohol. Publish our content on, so it's kind of included, but I don't refer to it as a social platform. The more consistent you can be in terms of posting regularly and staying consistent with your message, the platforms will learn what you're talking about. The platforms will see the kind of content that you're creating that you're always talking about the same kind of thing, which is a good thing, because if you're always changing topic and you're always changing direction, then they haven't got a clue what you're talking about. So how are they going to put you in front of somebody who might be interested in what you truly do if you don't talk about it consistently. I know that over the last few years, lots of people have been talking about that two letter word that really comes up all the time in every marketing conversation or business conversation, AI, and whether they like it or they loathe it. They're talking about it. But the challenge with that, even for those people who hate AI and are constantly putting it down, all they're going to be seeing in their feed is AI type content, because that's all they're kind of talking about. You know, what you put out there does attract that content back. So one of the things that I learned probably about a year ago, maybe sort of 18 months ago, I needed to change what I was talking about. Because what I was actually saying to people is that, you know, you could build out these complex funnels, and you can do all of these things, but you needed to simplify. What I led with was the problem, the pain and the challenge, and I led with all of that because that's what I believed hooked people in. But what I'm actually leading with more so now, and we have this kind of working, sort of SOP standard operating procedure within our business when I'm brainstorming content and working with my daughters to create my content, it's got to come from a positive angle. First it's got to come from a solution based angle. First it's got to come from a payoff based angle. And this is why what we need to be focused on is our own stuff. Consistency in our content will help us to be seen more, because we're showing up more, but we're staying on message. And if we can do that, we're going to build this audience that will want to come and talk to us, want to come and consume more of our content and want to buy from us. I'll say it again. The free line has moved so far away from your website, it's untrue. The free line where people are getting free stuff from you should now be in the public realm, YouTube, social media, podcasts. They're the things that you need to be creating more of. And you've got to be creating video content. Every single platform is prioritizing video more than anything else. Today, if you're not prioritizing video, there's going to be a challenge. You're not going to be seen, you're not going to be found, and so you have to be thinking about, how can I do it better? How can I show up in a way that I'm comfortable? How can I become more confident? How can I really not worry about what people are going to say or think about me when I show up? Because these are all the things that went through my mind before I started showing up on video, and actually, when I started to put those things out of my mind, and I started to think about the difference that I'm going to be able to make to other people's lives by sharing my beliefs, not just my frameworks, and not just the strategies that work, But my beliefs, the beliefs that I have deep down that I need to stand on, and the values that I have, the rock on which I will build everything is simplification. I believe the cult of hustle and complexity has trapped so many people, and I'm now starting to see more and more people talking about this and saying you don't need to add more to your business. You actually need to subtract and take away things from your business in order for it to breed, for it to to have space to grow. Simplicity is the answer to business growth, and that's my message. That's what I'm standing on. And even in this content that you're consuming for me right now, what I'm basically telling you is that the notion of hustling to build your email list so that you can then add a plethora of emails and so on and so forth, and then hype people up ready for a launch. Because if you build your email list, you've got an email list that you can then do a launch later on, and you can open cart and close cart and this, these are all complex strategies. The simplest way to grow your business is to show up in the marketplace, be really clear on the message that you have and how you can help people present an offer and engage people at a human level, have a real conversation with people that is the simplest path. And all the technology in the world, and all the AI that we've got has just added to all of this complexity. I wrote about this in my book, simplify the funnel. You can actually go and get a copy of simplify the funnel by going to simplify the funnel.com. Grab your copy. I talk about seed marketing, which is the way in which we can shape our expert level content, echo our values, engage. Our audience and deliver actionable content. That's what seed stands for. Then I talk about the minimum viable funnel and the minimum steps you need to be able to start making sales, not just generating leads. But the final piece is about selling without selling. That's a framework that I created that is just about human to human conversation. It's not about forcing a sale onto somebody. It's about having a conversation that allows the person in front of you to get to a point of realization they want to buy from you. All of the work that you do in putting your content out there and enabling people to buy something from you and get an amazing result will help you when you get onto a sales conversation about your high ticket program or your your main core offer, and the sale will pretty much have been done before you even have that conversation. And so my book is all about stripping everything back and helping you to simplify, not just your marketing, not just your sales, but your entire business operation. Because we only need a few clients every month, typically, if we've got higher ticket products and programs to be able to have that kind of lifestyle that we want. You know, circling right back to what we said at the start, if you want to be that influencer walking down the beach and all of this kind of stuff, and you want to be in the sunny places, you want to be that influencer, sound the hood of the Lambo posing, then simplify your business to be able to get there. Simplify it so that you focus on making sales. Sales sales is serving other people. If you sell something and they get a tremendous amount of value from it and transform their lives or their businesses in some way, you've served them in the best possible way. It's not about trying to be, you know, manipulative and, you know, persuasive, and learning all of those techniques you can literally show up be the best thing for somebody, help them in some way, allow them to consume seven hours of content over 11 different touch points on four different platforms. This is the 711 four framework that Google Talk about. If someone consumes seven hours of your content has 11 different touch points over four different platforms, they're more gonna that's potentially enough trust built to be able to buy from you. But I've had people buy from me from the first video that they've even seen. I've had people being on my email list for seven years or so after consuming lots of my content, buying a couple of little things, and being on my list, being part of my community, before they've even jumped into maybe a signature program, or bought my mastermind program, or bought some coaching from me directly, because it's how you build that relationship, how you show up, how you open up, and you're transparent and you're honest and you're you're caring, and you come from a servant heart. Perspective, I truly believe, Truly, truly, truly believe that the art of using lead magnets for lead generation today is one of the lowest return on investment strategies that we can have in our business. The highest is about consistency of message and selling somebody something. Don't be shy to position an offer. Position it at the right time. Make sure that it's absolutely on point for what your customer wants in some way, shape or form, and allow them to buy from you. The free line has moved so far away from your website, it is unreal. Start showing up. Start being visible. Create amazing content that people want to listen to engage with put your beliefs out there. Really engage with them at a human level as well. Don't let AI chat bots and automations do all of the conversation show up as a human and build a true relationship with those people. I think the advantage that people are going to have in the way in which people are going to grow their business and truly succeed, it's going to be those who choose to have human connection in some way. That's the advantage they're going to have over everybody else, and everybody else is trying to automate things and remove themselves from their business so that bots can do it. It's the people who stay in their business and connect at a human level. They're the ones that are going to succeed, human to human contact is in our nature. We are wired to connect with others. So why are we choosing to disconnect? I think AI bots, automations, it's become one of the biggest distractions on the planet for business owners, some people are spending more time now. Like as an example, I I had this conversation with my community, and a couple of people just were really honest. They spend more time creating their social media content now than they did before, even though they're using AI to help brainstorm and create the content, and then they have to go and edit that content and then post it out. If they were literally just had a plan to create content and put it out, they'd actually save time. And some people have just reverted back to how they were creating content in the first place before they got there, so that they could truly be able to create the content that's human. I mean, like this. There's no auto queue, there's no script with this piece of content I'm riffing here. But this is a belief system that I have rooted in me, that the free line has moved because of the way in which I've seen campaigns that I've built for clients over the past. Well, the shift came during covid and the pandemic. Campaigns from that point onwards that had lead magnets and freebies started to die. They literally started to literally just build lists of freebie hunters, but shifting that pattern and showing up and being more visible with physical content online in the public realm, on those platforms that the internet marketers never had access to. You know that YouTube and Facebook and Tiktok, it didn't exist when internet marketers were telling us to build our email lists. Now it does that's got to be our priority, and then drive people to get on your list as a buyer, the companies that are winning today are selling products and services. They're not just giving content away for free in return for an email address. So I implore you, go and grab a copy of my book, simplify the funnel. At simplify the funnel.com Learn seed marketing the minimum viable funnel and selling without selling, so that you can start to simplify your business and move things forward. We can simplify. We can escape the cult of hustle and complexity, and I want to serve you in the best possible way that I can do it. So head over to simplify the funnel.com. And grab your copy of my book today. If you've enjoyed this podcast, then please do subscribe wherever you're listening. Please share this episode with somebody who might need to hear it. If you've been having conversations with someone and they're struggling with lead generation and sales, send them a copy of this podcast. Send them a link to get them to listen to it. Please consider leaving a five star review. It helps not just me know that I'm producing great content, but it helps other people to discover this podcast as well. Please leave a five star review on whatever platform you're listening to this podcast on right now. Less, really, truly is the strategy and we can simplify so that we can scale. I've been ant Hodges, I look forward to chatting to you again on our next episode. You